Doctor Who_ The Death of Art Part 7

An old man, his face framed with wisps of white hair, came forward from an inner room. Chris wondered how old he was. He was probably not even a hundred.

84.The Doctor's room was barely the size of a broom closet. He glanced in it once, nodding as if its condition was perfectly adequate. Chris's and Roz's rooms were bigger but just as slovenly; the mildewed and tobacco-stained wallpaper hung down like cobwebs, almost touching the counterpanes. The TARDIS infrastructure closest to the Cathedral manifestation was still showing strong signs of Ace's message. Squinting, the Doctor could make out the roundels of the default architecture under the block-transfer overlay but otherwise he might as well have been in the real Paris. Good. He was relying on that.

He sat down in Roz's room, which was marginally the largest, and spread a 1957 map of Paris on the bed. The map was printed in sepia with a blue surround, and slid out of a cardboard sleeve with the motto 'A Bird's-Eye View of The Heart of Paris with its best hotels and restaurants and shows, conceived and pin-pointed by Grand Marnier' written on it. He still had the bottle of Grand Marnier somewhere, unopened. The Doctor held the map up to the light, first the right way up and then sideways. Whatever the creature had been that had killed Viers's a.s.sociate, it had come out of the sewers. With a thick black pencil he began to draw the line of the sewers onto the map.

When he had finished, he put the map on the bedside table by the black and gold telephone, and lay back. He had decided to wait for Roz or Chris to contact him. It was humiliating to be forced continuously back to the TARDIS like this, but it was necessary. There were powers on the move in Paris, the echoes of whose speech was enough to drive a telepath mad, and he could not afford to lose any of the edge that his normally precarious psionic abilities provided. For once in his lives, he needed to sleep.

Besides, it was the quickest way he knew to make the phone ring, aside from getting into the bath.

Inspector Jarre waited until the smirking gendarme had finished gasping white-faced over the bidet before sending him downstairs. His own throat felt tight and he had no desire to turn 85 around and look again at the body in the enamel and iron bathtub. The bathtub's carved legs were turned out like a sphinx's.

Ebony inset in iron. Yes, the bath was very much a la mode; and the body was, the body was still there, that's what it was. Still where they had found it, in bits, big bits, under the water, under the reddish brown water.

The big house was unoccupied. If it had not been for the nosy concierge of the apartment house next door, who had heard a disturbance and sent her recalcitrant husband to force the door and investigate, the murder might have gone unremarked until the stink had spread beyond the cold bathroom. The smell there was bad, but a body in a bath, like a second Maret, in a flash-house in a district full of painters and night-ladies and forgers of holy icons, was lilies in the field compared to the stench from the Ministry of War. At least Jarre told himself it was. He wanted his breakfast to stay down.

The body was that of a young man, but that was all Jarre could tell. The face had been smashed into fragments of bone, only held together now by tatters of skin. The hands had been removed. Grimacing, he checked something, thrust-ing his hand into the icy water. Not circ.u.mcised. At least this was not another religious killing.

'Armand,' he shouted. 'Give me a hand up here.'

Together they fished the body from the bath and wrapped the parts in sackcloth for the medical experts to examine.

Jarre noted that Jean-Paul did not turn a hair, unlike the vomiting Gerard. Insensitivity? It hardly fitted in with his general manner, but the alternative was that he was used to death, and Jarre doubted that the Alps saw that much bloodshed. Was that another point against him?

'I've been talking to the concierge, Inspector,' Jean-Paul said. 'She rents her upper rooms to art students. They're likely to be unco-operative, I ' m afraid, if her opinion of them is accurate.'

Jarre nodded. 'She's right enough. Students are always trouble. Rotting their brains with absinthe and smas.h.i.+ng the windows of the emba.s.sies in the rue Gabriel is the least of it.

It wouldn't surprise me if they were involved.'

86.'Instinct, Inspector?'

'Experience. The last time I trusted my instincts, a sweet old lady from Le Hague poisoned the second of her nephews before I suspected.' Jarre smiled inwardly. It had been an early case of his, and of a young foreign police sergeant who had been in Paris for the summer. He remembered the young Belgian's eyes, shrewd above an incipient attempt at a mous-tache. Jean-Paul's eyes had the same shrewdness.

Perhaps he deserved some leeway, some responsibility, or perhaps if he was given enough rope the contradictions in his character would come out in the tangle. 'Gerard and I will take this back to Doctor Tardieu's medical staff at the Prefecture. Get the statements from the artists and meet us there.'

In a cavern lit by flares from the ruptured gas pipes, Montague looked down upon his children. That was what they were, these members of the Brotherhood who had come to him for the energies to make their fantasies real, for although they had not sprung from his seed they had been changed by his flesh and power. He began to speak.

'Yesterday I began to take the first step on a journey that will bring us to our rightful place as the chosen people. You are the harbingers of a new humanity. Yesterday the first of the cursed Family fell before our hand, before our least little finger. The Family are effete, decadent, they cannot stand before us. We shall seize back the Doll's House, the central icon of our power, the vessel of the Dark G.o.ds. The blood of the d.a.m.ned Family will water the meadows of France. All who helped them will be destroyed. All.

'When I have it back beneath my hand, I will make you all as immortal as I am, and we will move to other cities; recruiting and revelling and learning new ways to live and feel and kill.' Joy shone in his ancient eyes. 'It will be glorious.'

When Jarre had gone, Chris ran to the telephone he had seen in the other room and dialled the code for the Notre Dame area of Paris, followed by a random number.

87.'h.e.l.lo?' A w o m a n ' s voice that he did not recognize answered the phone. Chris nerved himself to lie.

'Madame, I am an engineer of the phone company, checking your line for misdirected calls. Could you lay the phone receiver down for a couple of minutes without ending the call? Yes, just lay it down by the side of the phone. And thank you, yes. No, there isn't a charge.' Chris's face was crimson with embarra.s.sment. This had better work.

The familiar voice of the Doctor broke in on the line.

'Chris?'

'Yes.'

'You sound surprised.'

'Of course. I ' m surprised. You talked at me for twenty minutes before I left, explaining this, and I still don't know how the TARDIS is doing it.'

'Nonsense. It's a perfectly simple mapping of the electrical signal in the phone line, as picked up by the TARDIS sensors, to a like-dimensioned area of the TARDIS's interior.

Mind you, I wouldn't want to try this if there were more phones in use. The old girl's looking a bit green around the fluid links as it is.' The Doctor's voice was grumpy, and it had a note that Chris could not immediately identify. Sleepi-ness? Surely not. The line crackled, and Chris was not sure if he was still connected.

'h.e.l.lo,' Chris said. 'h.e.l.lo.' No response. He grimaced.

'Listen Doctor, if you can hear me, I can't hear you. I can be reached at the Hotel Mervaillac. I've joined up with the police inspector I mentioned in my note, and we're on general homicide duties. No leads at all on Mayeur, but w e ' v e got another body. Young, male, odd blotchy skin, very thoroughly dismembered. The inspector's taken it back to the Prefecture for examination. Is Roz doing any better than I am?' This was too painful. 'I'll try another number in that area, on the hour. I've got to go and talk to some students.'

In the TARDIS the Doctor dropped the sizzling phone, and licked his burnt fingers.

88.Later, notebook at the ready - he had no desire to embarra.s.s Jarre with any further displays of memory - Chris found himself listening to an earnest, slightly balding man in grey who emphasized his words with florid hand-waving.

'It's dreams that I paint,' he said triumphantly. 'Not the real world. Photography can do that; that is why it will be the death of art.'

Like the other students he had clearly been drinking heavily the night before and Chris had found him lying face-down across a partly painted picture. A .violent yellow-green ochre smeared up onto his cheek-bone. The painting showed a dark stone building, too forbidding to be a home, its windows, large bow affairs, crammed with half-seen detail. Chris realized it was a toy shop. Suddenly the white lead and ochre splodge that had half transferred itself to the man's face came into focus on the painting. In the front of the picture a doll, or a hairless baby-thing, crawled towards the spectator.

The other students nudged each other behind the artist's back at his harlequinesque appearance and Chris wondered if it was kinder to ignore it or draw his attention to it. He opted to ignore it.

Another of the artists looked over from the divan on which he reclined languidly, a bag of ice pressed firmly against his scalp.

'But Byram,' he expostulated, 'the shop exists. I have seen it. It stands off the Street of the Four Winds, where the Latin Quarter meets the stews. An ill-favoured establishment in an ill-favoured place, but a real one.'

Byram snorted. 'Alexi, you are an imbecile. Of shops and men alike there are a limited number. The marks on canvas that paint can make are not infinite. Next you will say that dolls crawl from this shop, yes?'

Alexi shut his eyes. 'I really cannot debate with you when my head is splitting. That is a real shop belonging to a real Monsieur Montfalcon, and it would not surprise me if anything did crawl from it, so morbid is its frontage. You drink too much absinthe, Byram. It makes you grumpy, and it makes your hair fall out.'

89.'Oh, why not tell the truth, Alexi?' said the third of the artists, a gaunt lantern-jawed man who had not yet spoken.

'Something is preying on the artists of Paris, a sickness, a madness. Byram there has the first signs, morbid and unpleasant dreams. He'll be off to join the Brotherhood of the Immanent Flesh soon enough.'

Byram spat in disgust, but his eyes looked nervous. Alexi turned on the third painter. 'Shut up, Tellec. What use is it to frighten Byram like that? He may be an oaf, but he's our oaf, not one of those hooded monsters.'

Tellec scowled. 'I say he will join them, and he will. Once the dreams start it is only a matter of time.'

'Immanent flesh?' said Chris.

'They teach that the essence of flesh . . . of protoplasm . ..

is upheld by a p o w e r . . . a force or potential permanently pervading the universe, and that to embrace it is to live life as art itself,' Byram said hesitantly.

Alexi grabbed his arm. 'Who told you what they teach?

They are never seen, only rumoured. Where did you hear that?'

Byram looked at Alexi with horror, and his voice cracked.

'I dreamt it,' he mumbled.

90.

Chapter 7.

T i m e U n k n o w n : S p a c e p o r t Five: Undercity: T h e F u t u r e T h e F u t u r e The meat-people were spilling out of the neon-lit abattoirs.

From her vantage point on the narrow ledge halfway up the shattered skysc.r.a.per Roz could see down into the boiling anarchy of the underland. Her mimetic suit blended in with the ancient ceramic tiling of the building.

A mile above her the steel underplate of the overcity filled the sky like the biggest thunderstorm imaginable.

It sounded like it too. She wore earplugs specifically tuned to be dead in the harmonic frequencies of the overcity's antigravs, and they still made her teeth chatter. She might need to visit an autodentist and have a new set of molars implanted after this mission. Just the benefit a young Adjudicator needed to look forward to after a tricky a.s.signment: a long slow root-ca.n.a.l.

Roz was feeling rightly pleased with herself. Her trainer, Konstantine, would see she could handle a solo job. The drone eyes she had sprinkled round the stonework were holo-filming the scene for evidence. The sonics, set to affect the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system, had flushed out the merchandise. Soon the farmers would be trying to get the beasts back in their pens and then she could arrest the lot.

The flesh exporters had been growing mindless human DNA-based clones and s.h.i.+pping them off-world for the 91 tables of gourmand carnivores. A human with an apple in its mouth was getting to be a status symbol on the dining platters of some of Earth's old enemies. It would have been quite a credit-spinner if Earth had had more enemies left; as it was, it was probably bringing in a third of the Undercity's illegal income, right after the virtual s.e.x and the real drugs.

Even the aliens that did not eat were buying. The Arcturan Amba.s.sador had hung half a preserved human carca.s.s on his wall at an important social event and called it a tribute to human twentieth-century art. Diplomats were still trying to decide if it had been an honest compliment that had misfired or a sly and deliberate insult. Aliens: pre-emptively pacify them or ally with them; they still refused to make sense.

Down below now, the farmers were stirred up. Their nervous systems were arranged differently to the clones so the sonics weren't affecting them, but the stampede was forcing them out to try to recapture the stock. Most of the farmers seemed to be ITs. That fitted the profiles Roz's sources had put together. The reptiles were probably runaways from one of the deep-mining stations. Roz couldn't understand it. ITs had solid second-cla.s.s citizens.h.i.+p. h.e.l.l, there'd been an infoflash on Channel Ninety that said the 'Indigenous Terrans' - Channel Ninety was intensely politically correct and considered the abbreviation 'ITs' to be in poor taste - had nearly cornered the jobs in the sub-surface shale industry that provided over ninety per cent of Earth's hydrocarbons. They had stable work, separate schools and hospitals, pet.i.tion rights to the Imperial Landsknechte. Why did some of them throw it away like this?

They had to be stupid. How bright could a species be that locked itself away in hibernation chambers to avoid a catastrophe and then mistimed their alarm-call by a million-plus years? She remembered an old joke. How many Silurians does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: one, but don't expect it to come round first thing in the morning.

Not that she was prejudiced against people. She could still remember wincing when her grandmother had gone on about the 'grey-faced half-breeds' of the Imperial Court. 'They did 92 not have our advantages,' her mother had said mildly. "They can't help their faces.'

'Well they don't have to go on holo-vision with them,'

her grandmother had snapped, secure in her pure African aristocracy.

August Mirakle moaned and s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand from the a.s.sa.s.sin's forehead. Tomas had returned after leaving Mirakle alone for a time, only to insist that he immediately regressed the Negress a dozen years, looking for when she was recruited or constructed by Montague. The hand-gun lay forgotten on the bench, a set of broken jeweller's tools beside it.

'Well?' Tomas snapped.

'It's like a vision of h.e.l.l,' August whimpered. 'Imagine a city of blast furnaces, of Blake's "satanic mills". Ruin it.

Then build over. Fill the sky with metal and the air with noise. She crouches on high like Lucifer surveying the fallen, and in the red fires below demons with three glowing eyes herd the d.a.m.ned into the mouth of the pit.'

Tomas wound a silk handkerchief around his right hand calmly and hit August hard in the face. 'This is reality,' he said. 'It has, you will agree, a distinctive feel.'

August coughed blood from his split lip. 'What?'

'You are being played for a fool, August. Montague has spewed these memories into her skull to make it impossible for us to learn anything from her, and to weaken and confuse us. It suits him to be seen as an unstoppable supernatural power, but he isn't. When I first met him he was healing beggars for food in a hovel, his precious Doll's House stolen from him, a trophy in the black warehouse of the Shadow Directory. I made the political connections that let him retrieve it. I kowtowed to the imbeciles of the Directory for years, maintaining an interest in their ridiculous esoterica so that they did not a.s.sociate me with its loss. Not Montague, I.

It was his blunder that let the Family steal it. His, not mine.'

August shuddered. When he was out of Tomas's presence, the Grandmaster had always seemed preferable to Montague.

N o w he was hard pressed to remember why.

93.Tomas unfolded his handkerchief and dabbed at August's lip tenderly. ' I ' m sorry August, you know the pressure I've been under. Attempts on my life, conspiracies, black spot in the garden. I should not have struck you. You know I value your endeavours.' His voice rose to a shout. 'Now get back in her head, and make it work for me. Take Montague's illusions and twist them. Strengthen her aggression and give her a focus on Montague. I don't care what she thinks he looks like, provided she's prepared to kill him.'

Roz waited until the Three-eyes were milling around like green ants on a red table-cloth. Then she gave the signal that released the Hexachromite-B gas. The Three-eyes started to stagger as the gas ruptured the mucous membranes of their lungs. One raised a clenched three-fingered hand in the Reptile Power salute before the arteries lining its respiratory tract collapsed and it choked on its own blood. Most of them just died. Quick and clean: just like Konstantine liked it.

She watched the Adjudication reclamation 'bots swoop down. The 'bots' audio speakers were playing Justifiable Ragnarok's 'Odin's Missing E y e ' at twenty decibels, just like in VonDoon's cla.s.sic vid 'Heaven N o w ' . Back-up was in a humorous mood; barely one in a million people would pick up that historical reference. The 'bots had neural whip attachments fastened to their multi-use limbs. The meat-people would be rounded up and used in the Church of the Adjudication's organ-banks to increase the lifespan of law-abiding citizens. If they could find any.

Two hundred plus cases of human-genome copyright fraud, multiple counts of dodging export fees, dozens of crimes against the Dignity of Humanity Charter, doubtless several cases of illegal breaking of contractual indenture to the shale mines, all closed. It had been a good morning's work.

Except it had not been Hexachromite-B, had it? Surely it had been a knock-out gas she had used, not a one-part-per-billion LD99.9 nerve gas? Surely she had not recognized the noise the back-up team had run through the 'bots' speakers; it could not have been called music until years later when 94 Bernice had made her sit through VonDoon's vid, insisting that it and Come The Trickster's H v L P had been the only honest accounts of the war on Heaven. A thick grey wall of confusion swept over her. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

Major Henri opened the envelope that his agents had taken from the headquarters of the Gendarmerie. The paper of the message, impregnated as it was with a smart chemical that expected to meet the natural oils of Chris's fingertips, flashed into a magnesium flare and burnt to a fine grey ash. Henri swore under his breath.

August sipped the gla.s.s of water Tomas had brought him.

'I've had to deepen her trance. I got the impression she was fighting the mesmerism, trying to cling to more recent events. She seems to be rejecting my suggestion that the memory we found earlier should have been handled more forcibly, but I get the impression that it was a logistical, legalistic objection rather than a moral one.'

'So she would have no objection to killing if she thought the death was justified?'

August bit back a sharp reply. Obviously not, if she's an a.s.sa.s.sin, he had almost said. He temporized. 'No sir. I don't understand many of the images that Montague has put into her mind, but I am fairly certain I can suggest a sequence that will prime her to kill him. She'll provide the necessary imagery herself, from the store-rooms, as it were.' He hesitated. 'May I ask why it's so urgent? If I could have had longer to work on the weapon Tomas shrugged. 'It may not be up to us. Montague is moving. He has set one of the novices to attack the Family.

Heaven knows why he thought the boy would succeed.'

'He failed, of course!'

'Apparently not, actually. That's why I think we may not have much time. Montague and the Family are like two useful complementary machines. One, Montague, is useful for a time, but grows progressively overheated. The other, the 95 Family, is fiddly and a nuisance to keep in repair, and performs no useful work of its own, but functions like a safety valve to draw off the head of steam from the first machine until its fires die down and it is safe again.'

'Except this time Montague is destroying the safety valve?'

'Yes.'

'And then?'

'Why, boom of course, my dear August. Boom!'

96.